Educated Gamer: Mass Effects and Nonlinear Narrative

"Video games free people from the shackles of linear storyline, storyline can be moulded by the actions of the player. Thus the experience is customised to the player creating more involvement and hence more emotional attachment. The player feels a part of the story he or she created and the characters in it. Older games had no progressive stories other than movements like up down, left right, shoot. Modern games are different, story can unfold all around you."

"Sequels are black holes of creativity: they should only be created if there is an entirely new experience to add, not because there’s more t-shirts to be sold. You see the way Mass Effect was designed differently – it was envisioned as a trilogy, so they had already planned for two sequels and built their games around a fluid story."

Too bad they slowly sold their souls after the first one for the sake of getting 250-300k more sales and dumbed the story down to unimaginable levels with the third one then...

All this pandering to lowest common denominator to sell a couple thousand more copies crap has to stop.

funny how they should sort of use mass effect as an example of nonlinear narrative (and how you should still be upset about it).

the reality is that the narrative in ME was just as linear as any other game. they only disguised it with the illusion of "choice." i liken it to a mathmatical magic trick where no matter what number you start with at the beginning, after all of the additions, subtractions, divisions, and multiplications, you all end up with the exact same result.

no matter how you varied your decisions, you all saw the exact same variety of cutscenes, you all saw the exact same endings. that's pretty linear.

it's pretty hilarious that people thought that their choices had some kind of butterfly effect on the ending of the game.